Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise

Conversations with Steve Beresford

Andy Hamilton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501366451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Steve Beresford's polymathic activities have formed a prism for the UK improv scene since the 1970s. He is internationally known as a free improviser on piano, toy piano and electronics, composer for film and TV, and raconteur and Dadaist visionary. His résumé is filled with collaborations with hundreds of musicians and other artists, including such leading improvisers as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Zorn, and he has given performances of works by John Cage and Christian Marclay. In this book, Beresford is heard in his own words through first-hand interviews with the author. Beresford provides compelling insight into an extensive range of topics, displaying the broad cultural context in which music is embedded. The volume combines chronological and thematic chapters, with topics covering improvisation and composition in jazz and free music; the connections between art, entertainment and popular culture; the audience for free improvisation; writing music for films; recording improvised music in the studio; and teaching improvisation. It places Beresford in the context of improvised and related musics – jazz, free jazz, free improvisation – in which there is growing interest. The linear narrative is broken up by 'interventions' or short pieces by collaborators and commentators.

1

Early Life, 1950–74, and Musical Education

Steve Beresford was born in Wellington, Shropshire, in 1950, and started playing piano at the age of seven, studying the classical repertoire. From age fifteen, he played trumpet in the Shropshire Schools’ Symphony Orchestra. He played Hammond organ in a soul band in Wellington, called Hooker Green – named after a paint colour – and remained a band-member during his first year of studying music at York University. After graduating, he stayed in York to work in theatre groups and working men’s clubs, also playing improvised music in Bread and Cheese, with Dave Herzfeld (drums) and Neil Lamb (guitar). He worked in a group with drummer Dave Solomon, whose repertoire included Otis Redding, Sam and Dave and Motown hits, before joining US guitarist/singer Danny Adler’s pub rock band Roogalator. He moved to London in 1974. This chapter covers musical developments up to that date, before Beresford began his close involvement with leading free improvisers.

Your fellow improviser Rhodri Davies says that you used to be polemical and acerbic. Have you mellowed?

I wasn’t conscious of being polemical and acerbic, but I think I was, from what people tell me.

Did you begin in jazz?

No. But my father [Les] was a singer in a semi-pro dance band. He also played a bit of guitar. When he used to sing with a big band, the Musicians’ Union rule was you didn’t get paid if you were a singer – singers didn’t count as musicians. So my dad had to play probably rather quiet rhythm guitar to get paid. He loved singing standards.

His collection of 78s was mainly Swing, quite a lot of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, a bit of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington – he loved Johnny Hodges, Benny Goodman, Archie Shaw, that kind of period. During the war, when my mum and dad were courting, there were three gigs a day at the local dance halls – there was one at the top of the high street in Wellington, and a ballroom at the major employer called Sankeys. My dad performed many times at the dance hall at the top of the high street.

[Beresford adds: Hang on, there’s a typo there – it’s Artie Shaw, not Archie. Maybe there’s an Artie Shepp further on. A few years ago, a Barbican press release for McCoy Tyner described him as the piano player in Robbie Coltrane’s famous quartet.]

You could go to a lunchtime concert, an early evening concert and a late evening concert, and they went dancing all the time – they loved dancing. My mum’s family was musical. Her dad had played cornet in a very early English dance band that toured America – extraordinarily, I think, in the 1920s. His name was Fred Hands, and he played cornet with his brother, Jim, who later became a piano player with the Debroy Somers Society Orchestra – a big, posh dance band in the 1930s. Jim played piano and also accordion, apparently for Gaumont British films.

A big story in my family that I still haven’t been able to prove, though I’ve looked at all the books, is that Jim Hands – my great-uncle – played piano for Louis Armstrong in 1931 or 1932, when Louis was here. That’s fantastic if true – I’m thrilled just by the rumour! The first time Louis came he was escaping the Mob, I think – they thought “This guy’s making money, we want a piece of him.” I think he finally had to come to some arrangement.

My maternal grandad remarried – his first wife died – and then gave up jazz and was slightly embarrassed that he’d ever played it, I think. He played classical violin.

So, my mother [June] had a musical background. She didn’t play an instrument, but she liked singing and dancing. My paternal grandad played a bit of harmonium, so both sides of the family had a musical background. I have a sister, Anne, who produces dance and music films, plays piano and has always danced, and a younger brother Pete, who plays piano and other instruments, is versatile and runs bands.

My parents loved jazz, so I grew up listening to it. The first record I bought was “Good Golly Miss Molly” by Little Richard, on a 78 – I was seven when that came out. I still think that’s a fantastic record; I’m very proud that that was the first record I bought.

I soon started listening to Charlie Parker. There was a stall in the market that sold EPs – this was Wellington in Shropshire, a market town twelve miles from Shrewsbury. At that time, this guy specialised in EPs, and I got Monk and Coltrane – “Trinkle Tinkle,” “Ruby, My Dear” – and Miles Davis and Coltrane. It was a little too much for my parents, but they didn’t hate it.

The first book I read about jazz in was Brian Rust’s Penguin – Jazz Records 1897–1942 (1961). Rust thought that Coleman Hawkins could have been a good player, if he’d played the clarinet – and that a band with a guitar and not a banjo was unacceptable. He thought instrumentation should stay as it was in 1923 – a ridiculous purism about jazz. Then I read Sidney Bechet’s autobiography Treat It Gentle.¹ It wasn’t that there were millions of books on jazz coming out.

Did you have piano lessons?

Yes, I started when I was seven, initially with a lady called Mrs Edwards – but then it transpired that she wasn’t really teaching me to read music, I was just copying her fingers. Then I had Mrs Evans, who was a much better piano teacher, but we never saw eye to eye aesthetically. I wasn’t playing by ear, I was playing by sight, I was looking at the fingers – I don’t think I played by ear. But I learned to read music with Mrs Evans.

I did the Associated Board piano exams. When I went to university I had a few lessons with a guy whose name I forget – but he tried to look exactly like Stockhausen, with the same floppy haircut and safari suits. He was very much in the mould of the extremely severe classical piano teacher, and I don’t think he thought much of me.

At about the age of fifteen I joined a soul band called Hooker Green – by this time I was playing trumpet as well. I was listening to Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, but I had no idea how this music was constructed. I’d never heard anyone play piano like Cecil – I thought he just banged piano with his fists, but it didn’t sound the same when I did it. I didn’t know about chord sequences – I was living in Shropshire and nobody round there could tell me how to voice chords or anything.

The thing about jazz piano from that era, the bebop era, is that chord-shapes are very hard to hear – what the hell are they playing in the left hand? I went through my whole university career asking various jazz pianists what the hell you do with your left hand, and nobody would tell me. But when I listened to “Green Onions” by Booker T and the MGs – which I still think is a fantastic record – I could work out what the organist, Booker T Jones o n Hammond B3, was doing. “Green Onions” was a sufficiently simple piece of music, so I began to figure out how you could improvise over a chord sequence.

This would be about 1965, and we were playing Stax and Motown tunes, around Shropshire and Wolverhampton. This was before uni, and during the first year, when I went back home. We were a relatively successful local band, but probably we were terrible. They finally got me a small Hammond organ to play, and I did more on that. That’s definitely what got me into improvising. I wanted to sound like Cecil Taylor but obviously I couldn’t start off that way.

I love soul music, I think it’s great. I think I was a bit snobbish about it in those days, though. I would say “Of course, Coltrane is miles better than Junior Walker.” These days I love Junior Walker as much as Coltrane, and I think the song-writing is incredibly impressive in that period of Stax, Motown and Atlantic. I love that period of soul music – Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved A Man,” and the slightly later stuff like Sly and the Family Stone, and Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis/Live! – that’s an amazing record. At university everyone laughed at my soul records, because they were hippies.

Hippies didn’t like soul music?

They didn’t like it at all, because it was on singles [rather than albums], and showed you weren’t intellectual enough. Also there wasn’t much of an interest in African-American music – except for Arthur Lee, Richie Havens, and Jimi Hendrix. Anything that was dancey, they didn’t like.

What did your parents think about your music?

Especially coming from that period, and that they probably didn’t find free improvisation that congenial, they were very supportive.

I think they saw the soul band once. I don’t think they ever went to one of my free improv gigs, because I never played free improv in Wellington. And they never came to London – I mean, they weren’t very mobile towards the end.

They sort of liked the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

I think they were very happy that I was doing what I enjoyed.

I’d wanted a gap year, but the feeling then was that it wasn’t a good idea. I don’t think the soul band would ever have taken off, particularly.

Did you know [former Labour Party leader] Jeremy Corbyn, who was born in nearby Telford, a year before you?

What’s super-embarrassing is that decades ago I had a drink with a Corbyn in the pub near my parents’ house – and I can’t recall if it was him, or his slightly creepy right-wing brother Piers, the climate-change denier.²

You studied at York University.

I studied music there, starting in 1968. Wilfrid Mellers was professor. He used to wear boot-lace ties, like cowboy ties, and he would sit cross-legged on the table and talk about Bach – he was fantastic talking about Bach. He would pummel out a prelude, get all the notes wrong, but he’d play it with fantastic enthusiasm.

It was a very good music department, wasn’t it?

Well, it wasn’t great for me. The first lecture was by David Blake, who I later discovered to be an ex-student of Eisler’s. He was, I’m guessing, a pretty unreconstructed Stalinist. His first lecture was about Webern, who I’d never heard of – though by this time I’d got as far as SME [Spontaneous Music Ensemble], and I’d heard Sun Ra, Ornette, Coltrane, maybe a little bit of Cecil.

I had the same response to Webern as my friend Shirley Thompson, a comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Steve Beresford’s Top Tips for Improvisers
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Stewart Lee
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Short Biography of Steve Beresford
• 1 Early Life, 1950–74, and Musical Education
• 2 The Portsmouth Sinfonia
• 3 Second-Generation Free Improviser
• 4 Derek Bailey
• 5 Company Week 1977 + The Dutch School + Alterations + White String’s
• 6 Saxophonists: Evan Parker, Tony Coe and Lol Coxhill
• 7 Piano, Toy Piano, Toys
• 8 Jazz, Free Jazz, and Free Improvisation
• 9 Teaching Improvisation
• 10 The 1980s and 1990s
• 11 Film Music + Christian Marclay + Video Artists + Visual Art
• 12 Graphic Notation + John Cage + Classical Music
• 13 The Improv Scene + The Audience
• 14 Post-2000
• 15 Comedy and Entertainment
• 16 Popular Music, Popular Culture
• 17 Electronics, Sound, and Recording
• Steve Beresford Discography
• Bibliography and Discography
• Index
• Copyright